Think pads get ordered by companies in bulk. After a few years, they get swapped out for a newer model. The old ones often get resold to a refurbishing company, and they test them and sell them refurbished for way less money. This happens a lot, so because they are refurbished and there's so many of them, prices are extremely low. I got like 6 of them for 200€ each. It's insane. So that explains the extremely cheap ones.

I could hypothesize that the price jump is because there's a gap between new and refurbished models, but tbh I don't really know and I also don't see that much of a jump. But that's kind of my theory. Hope that helps.

Refurbed business machines FTW, you can find them easily on e-bay and they usually come with extended warranties too.

They have the cheapo plastictastic ones they sell to consumers, the generally decent mid range ones that corpos buy in bulk for their office drones and the fancy ones for executives. Then of course there's the secondhand market where the corpo machines get flogged off for cheap after a few years of use.

Are you talking about used ones? There are no new ones for less than a thousand.

Reminder: Lenovo got caught putting a rootkit in their BIOS so...you should probably not buy one at any price.

I got my T14 for less than $100

It works great for what I need it to with Mint

The computer store didn't have it for sale. I went and asked if they had any really cheap laptops out back, that still could do browsing and streaming

They had a whole stack of maybe 15 laptops that they were going to either ditch or strip

So I think the answer is, that they'd rather sell you a really expensive computer when they know that you're afraid to buy a really cheap one

If you post two examples I can probably break down the differences, but as other people said new carries a premium over used/refurbished and for old ones they’ve been around for decades so the specs could vary wildly.

Go on eBay or whatever marketplace and search for any halfway recent X or T models. Specs obciously depend on what you need. I only use my laptop once or twice a week when I don't feel like writing/coding on my desk and would rather sit on the couch or go somwhere else so a Gen 1 X13 with an i5 10310U and 8GB RAM for 120€ was perfect for me.

You either get them refurbished on ebay or brand new. They don't sell for less than $2k new. Newish refurb thinkpads can be as high as $800

that still kind expensive.

They come in all shapes and sizes

I'm too lazy to look up Lenovos current lineup of products. But atleast 10 years ago when i was somewhat knowledgable on that matter they already had tons of differing SKUs to water down the brand. The $2000 offerings were normally the T and X series. The business juggernauts. T's for the devs. X's for the departments who wanted a Macbook Air but werent allowed to have one from corporate for reasons(MS contract). I think there also was also the somewhat rare W-series with workstation GPUs for the engineers.

But Lenovo also branded the L and E series as thinkpads. Which were just shitty entry level laptops with the design cues of a "real" Thinkpad. Whats a "real" Thinkpad? Probably some IBM machine with a Pentium 3 processor if you ask an enthusiast.

Anyway, i made half of my post up.

The specs.